This might be enough to keep me from upgrading, but I am not sure if this is limited to Falcon. Will future MySQL releases require the use of row based replication? Having SQL statements in the binlog is invaluable to me and I am not willing to give that up.

Now, seriously, it is not trivial to disable statement-based replication for any engine so it is basically always on; whether it works as expected is a different story. So, in short: there is nothing specifically done to disable statement-based replication for the Falcon engine. It is just not supported by them (yet).

You can actually use statement-based replication to replicate any tables using any engine, Cluster tables as well. It is not a good idea to replicate Cluster tables for several reasons, but it is possible.

We will continue to maintain statement-based replication for the foreseeable future, but it is just not possible to handle all the quirks that can occur in odd situations (for some examples, see BUG#31168, BUG#3989, and BUG#19630). If you know how to write queries that avoid problems like these, you will not have any problems, but if you are concerned about whether you're up to it, switch to use row-based replication.